THEATRE REVIEW: Tartuffe, Roger McGough, Liverpool Playhouse

May 14 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Tartuffe, Roger McGough, Liverpool Playhouse _320

THERE are times when a critic is redundant and last night was one. There is absolutely nothing to criticise about Tartuffe at the Liverpool Playhouse.

It is about as fine a combination of script and production as you are likely to get.

Moliere’s 17th-century verse comedy about a rogue – Tartuffe – using religious piety to worm his way into the affections of a householder has been given new life by Liverpool’s own poet Roger McGough.

He has adapted the play, keeping it in period, and turned it into one of the funniest and cleverest of farces.

His comical rhymes push the story along at a cracking pace, with virtually a laugh a line, while the cast tease out every nuance in McGough’s script.

There are lines you just want to scribble down, many that are complete poems in their own right.

When the householder Orgon tells how Tartuffe buried a dead bee, his son-in-law Cleante suggests a tombstone inscription: “Here lieth a bee/ No longer busy/ RIP/ Death, where is thy sting?”

Simon Coates, playing Cleante, allows just the right pauses between the lines so that the whole builds to a comic crescendo. It is typical of hundreds of such moments.

McGough is always springing surprises, too. When the poetry seems almost in period, he will come out with a modernism like Orgon’s cry of “Heavens to Betsy” and sometimes there are pure gags. “You wretch,” declares Orgon of his son Damis. “I will in a minute,” he replies.

It’s playing with language but done so artlessly that the laughs are always there.

In the tale, only Orgon (an extravagant Joseph Alessi) and his old mother (Eithne Browne in comic hectoring mode) believe in Tartuffe. The rest of the family see him as the hypocrite and conman he is.

When Tartuffe finally emerges quite a long way in, he does not disappoint. John Ramm plays him as a grubby-clothed, unshaved lecher, waving a crucifix and perfectly villainous. He is also the only character to speak in prose.

It is all played in high style by the perfect cast, dressed gloriously and with a smashing set – a crescent-shaped, high-walled room with numerous windows – from designer Ruari Murchison.

Director Gemma Bodinetz ably mixes McGough’s verbal dexterity with great sight gags, saving one of the best for last. A brilliant show.

philkey@dailypost.co.uk